Positioning is not what you think it is
April Dunford has repositioned over 200 B2B tech companies, and her first move is almost always the same: destroy the team's assumption that positioning is a marketing deliverable. It isn't. Positioning, in Dunford's framework, is a precise answer to four questions: What are customers' real alternatives? How are you different from those alternatives? What unique value does that difference produce? And who cares most about that value? Every element depends on the others. Skip one and your positioning collapses.
Weak positioning is a coordination failure
The most common symptom Dunford diagnoses isn't a bad tagline — it's four different answers to the same question. The founder has one story. Marketing has another. Sales has a third. Customers read something different entirely. None of these is wrong exactly; they just were never reconciled. Weak positioning, she argues, is not a missing document. It's a series of conflicting documents the company never forced into alignment. That misalignment is expensive: it shows up as longer sales cycles, higher churn, and deals lost to 'no decision.'
Start with your best customers, not your opinions
When Dunford walks into a positioning workshop, she stops teams from asking 'why does everyone love our product?' That question produces opinions you can't measure. The right question is: who buys fastest, pays most, negotiates least, and renews reliably? Find those customers, reverse-engineer what they share in common, and that is your positioning signal. Your internal beliefs about value are a hypothesis; your best customers' behavior is the data.
The status quo is your biggest competitor
In B2B, roughly 40% of deals are lost to 'no decision' — not to a competitor. That means the real alternative is often doing nothing, using a spreadsheet, hiring a person, or building in-house. If your positioning only names the vendors on a shortlist, you're ignoring the alternative you lose to most. Name it honestly and you can actually position against it.
Positioning belongs to everyone
Because PMs, sales reps, and marketers all carry and broadcast positioning — often in conflicting directions — this is not a task you can delegate to the marketing team and consider done. The PM who understands positioning deeply can be the person who reconciles those conflicting narratives and keeps the company's signal coherent as the product evolves.